Billions of dollars are spent annually delivering high speed fiber networks to Multi-Dwelling Units (MDUs), such as apartments, condos, and student-housing. Service providers recognize the rich potential returns on a fiber investment in such high-density markets. There are a number of fiber network architectures that service providers use for deployment of fiber-to-the-premise (FTTP) services. A Passive Optical Network (PON) has been very successful in this application.
PON technology is a point-to-multipoint FTTP network architecture that uses unpowered optical splitters, which allow a single optical fiber to serve multiple premises. Being passive, a PON has no active electronics in the network loop, which significantly lowers maintenance costs. Also, due to the reduced number of network elements there are fewer potential failure points, minimizing operational expense.
In MDU environments, there is typically limited space in equipment rooms on each floor to store telecom cross-connect cabinets, let alone slack storage. Due to the size of drop fiber cable, a fiber installation usually requires an additional slack storage box to store drop fiber slack. Since there is typically little or no space at all in each equipment closet, installers currently cut the fiber to length and splice on connectors to minimize slack storage.